Category: Peace Voice

My neighbors are good people. Always ready with a polite nod or wave. Helpful if your car breaks down. In this rural region, they’re farmers and loggers, truckers and mechanics. They’re quick to volunteer for the local fire department, show up for spaghetti dinner fundraisers, and plow the seniors’ driveway in a pinch.  Two-thirds of […]

Image: Portland, OR, June 2025 by Spicypepper999 – CC0 No one likes to be deceived. Or misled. To the best of our abilities, we try to use make good decisions based on the information we receive.  What if that information is wrong?  President Trump watched Fox News coverage of riotous protests in Portland, Oregon, and […]

Charlie Kirk’s murder. School shootings in Minneapolis and Denver. Genocide in Gaza. Russia’s war in Ukraine. Violence is everywhere. It’s frightening and heartbreaking. No one likes violence. Do they?  In truth, our culture sends out very mixed messages when it comes to violence. We glorify it in movies. We fantasize about it in video games. […]

Image By Ashraf Amra – UNRWA: United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, CC BY-SA 4.0 Gaza is being starved – deliberately, with cruel intention and shocking inhumanity. The photos of skeletal children haunt me. At night when I close my eyes. At dawn when I rise. They should […]

Image: Trump at Alligator Alcatraz in Florida. Photo by The White House, Public Domain After spending months firing federal workers, slashing public services, gutting healthcare, and raising taxes for everyone but the rich, our country just wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on a detention center in Florida. Dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, it’s nothing more […]

Originally published by PeaceVoice in journals nationwide on Feb 15, 2025 It takes time. That’s what people keep saying in response to concerns about the Trump Administration. It’ll take time before he can get the good stuff done. They say the promised benefits to this chaos are coming soon. Don’t hold your breath. The egg […]

If it launched with a Nazi salute … where do you think it ends?  On Monday, January 20th in the Capitol Rotunda, tech billionaire Elon Musk threw what appeared to be a Nazi salute during the inauguration of Donald Trump as US president. In case we missed it (or misinterpreted it), he made the emphatic gesture again.  […]

by Rivera Sun for Peace Voice On Election Night in my small town, I sat around a folding table with four election clerks, sworn in by the election warden and doing my civic duty to count every vote. The polls had closed. Darkness pressed heavy against the windows, as it does this time of year […]

Originally published on Waging Nonviolence After the shooting at former President Trump’s campaign rally, many people rushed to say that “political violence has no place in our democracy.”  Let’s go even further and boldly say: political nonviolence is essential for democracy.  The ties between nonviolence and democracy run deep. We know from the groundbreaking research of Erica Chenoweth […]

Every child has that book. The one that breaks your heart wide open. Bridge To Terabithia. The Velveteen Rabbit. Charlotte’s Web. The Hate U Give.  For me, it was Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. Based on the true story of Sadako Sasaki, it tells the story of a 12-year-old girl who survived the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima as […]

Image by Pexels from Pixabay Local news has its finger on the pulse of our communities. When city council acts (or acts up), when disaster strikes, when corruption or scandal needs to be scrutinized, local news steps up. From our kids’ sporting events to small town heroes, road construction detours to storm preparedness, they cover […]

It’s four in the morning and my heart is in my throat again. The presidential election in November fills me with nothing but dread and despair.  On the one hand, we’re facing a candidate who spews hatred, advocates violence, and peddles sneakers and bibles while facing astronomical legal costs for his fraud, lies, sexual assaults […]

By Rivera Sun for Peace Voice As the primaries heat up and the nation goes through the throes of another election cycle, cast your vote for something unexpected, something that defies the lies of politicians, something that could save our nation – and most certainly our souls. Make a choice to weather this election year […]

We all have our reasons for getting alarmed about the climate crisis. With bare ground at Christmas and no snow on the horizon, my neighbors just got theirs. This Northern Maine valley nestles against the border of Canada – and winter without snow is unfathomable. Snowmobiling is a big deal around here. While most of […]

. By Rivera Sun for Peace Voice At the post office, my neighbor rolled down the window of his pick-up truck to chat. As is typical in Northern Maine this time of year, we praised the sunlight, warmth, bare patches of ground, and eyed the shrinking snowbanks with delight. “Winter wasn’t so bad, this year,” […]

When I was a teenager, I knew global warming was caused by fossil fuels. So did Exxon.  For decades, Exxon has been hiding the truth about the climate crisis, burying their own scientific reports. From 1970 to 2003, the oil company ran studies that accurately predicted the disastrous consequences of continuing to burn fossil fuels.  They modeled […]

How can anyone sleep at night? My first nightmare about environmental crisis occurred in 1990. I was eight years old. In it, acid rain poured from the sky, scalding the skin of humans and stripping holes in the leaves of trees. On either side of a long, ashen-gray street, billowing plumes of smog chugged out […]

The last thing any of us need is a war with Russia over the Ukraine. You don’t need to know much about foreign policy to know that. Let the pundits and talking heads argue about the nuances of NATO and war maneuvers at the border of Russia. For most Americans, there are at least four […]

It snowed, finally. We’ve been waiting for months, restless and agitated. Have you ever seen your child settle more deeply into slumber after you tuck them under the blanket? That’s how it feels here. I live in the high-altitude desert of Northern New Mexico. Deserts often invoke images of Saharan sands, but this desert sprawls […]

Today, a child was born, tiny hands curling and unfurling with the startled shock of cool air on wet skin, oxygen flooding into newly-opened lungs as she cries upon entering this strange new world. This child will likely live to see 2100. The date hangs, inconceivable, futuristic, but now within the span of a single […]

It’s outdated. It’s dysfunctional. It’s hated by most of the populace. No, we’re not talking about the line at the DMV. We’re talking about the Selective Service and the military draft. For decades, young men have had to register. Now, congress is considering expanding draft registration to women.  Here’s a better idea: let’s abolish the […]

A young Kansas grain farmer and I were riding on a train through Iowa when the subject of the climate crisis came up. He was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed son of a multigenerational Midwest farming family. I’d grown up on a potato farm in Northern Maine. Both of us spent our teenage years in overalls. We […]

A continent-wide snow storm swept across the United States last week. From Seattle to Baton Rouge and from Dallas to Minneapolis, people grappled with road closures, shutdowns, power outages, and freezing temperatures.  From sea to shining sea, ordinary people stepped up to take care of one another. My brother volunteered to snowblow the Seattle offices […]

Image via Today, “Could The COVID-19 Memorial Become Permanent?” Four hundred lights stretch along the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall. Each represents one thousand people in America who have died of COVID-19. It is only in their absence that we have space to acknowledge the dead–there is not enough space beside the pool for that […]